Samuel Beckett: Color, Letter, and Line

Abstract

Samuel Beckett is portrayed as a supreme "colorist of prose" through a decoding of the letter in the text. A critical spotlight is focused on the subtle nuancing of monochromatic black on white lettering in Beckett’s Mal vu mal dit and on the shading arising from an overlay of the French on Beckett’s own translation into English (Ill Seen Ill Said) and the bilingual punning that results. The text and its subject hover between two languages in complementary and conflictual relation to each other, and between two arts. The fundamental ambiguity in the text and lack of definition of the subject — whose pronoun shifts from I to he, to she, to we — are amplified by the translation from the affective ("colored") French to terms of clearer articulation, in the black on white of Beckett’s native English. Mal vu mal dit, the text that embodies the subject, hesitates between the now fading vision that inspired it and the act of articulation and is thus both "ill seen" and "ill said." To conclude, the blue that colors the beginning of Beckett’s text is defined to Cezanne’s terms, as an atmospheric tone evoking a super-nature and the illusion of infinite depth. Awash in this bluish cast (bleuté), Mal vu mal dit is thus divested of semantic distinctness and permits the play of, and play with, visible signifiers, or letters.